It’s that time of year again – the new CoD game is about to integrate with Call of Duty Warzone. Whenever this merging of content and mechanics happens in the battle royale, it usually ends in a buggy or unbalanced mess – there’s a very good chance that this will happen with Black Ops 6’s integration too. However, even if it isn’t a totally smooth transition, the new set of Warzone Season 1 patch notes genuinely set this up as one of the greatest updates the game has ever seen.
Black Ops 6 has been a storming success so far, so naturally there’s a lot of excitement about getting elements of that gameplay experience pasted into Warzone. Omnimovement will give you more diving, strafing, and prone options than ever before and the eternally-hilarious body shield feature will let you take an enemy as a hostage and use them as a bullet sponge. The premise of a huge influx of fresh weapons, equipment, and perks for your loadouts is also enough to get any fan of the battle royale game pumped. Pile on top of that the new Area 99 map, and you’ve already got plenty to write home about.
However, the patch notes detail several other important changes that Warzone custodian Raven Software and Treyarch are making in this huge Season 1 update.
For me, the inventory changes are right up there as the most significant. While this was touted a while back, seeing it in black and white in the patch notes is exciting. The convoluted and fiddly backpack system of the last couple of years has been chucked in the trash, and a new “streamlined” inventory UI similar to the one seen in Warzone’s early days takes its place.
Then there’s an overhaul to the game’s vehicles. Again, the experience has been stripped back to something resembling what we saw in the original version of the game. All vehicles have been given new physics that should “bring more fun to driving” and make them easier to control across the board. Some of the additional obstacles to using vehicles have also been removed – flat tires, vehicle repairing, and fuel levels have all been binned.
For a hattrick of ‘going back to the good old days’ changes, loadouts have been reverted back to how they used to be with one primary weapon and one secondary as standard. While the Modern Warfare 2 and 3 era let you simply run whatever two weapons you wanted, the ability to run double primary weapons (a sniper and an assault rifle, for example) is now locked behind the returning Overkill wildcard. Call me a traditionalist, but it’s just better this way.
Replenishing your armor plates has also been sped up to compliment the faster paced action that the Black Ops 6 integration is going to bring – 8% faster, in fact.
A huge amount of effort has also gone into rebalancing the existing mountain of weapons pulled from MW2 and MW3. There are too many changes to even begin to summarize here – check out the full patch notes if you care that deeply – but Raven and Treyarch seem to be showing more awareness to the fact that the newly-added weapons in a Warzone integration often outperform the existing guns massively. Admittedly, Warzone suffers from some serious weapon bloat – when Season 1 drops, there will be 170 of them to choose from. But for those free-to-play folks that haven’t been grinding the new Black Ops 6 weapons for the last few weeks, this is encouraging news.
So, the best Warzone update ever? It really could be, you know. We’ll of course see how things shake out in the coming days as the meta adjusts and players get to grips with the new mechanics. But the combination of new BO6 elements and reversing some of the anti-fun changes made in recent years sounds like a recipe for success. Warzone Season 1 gets underway imminently on Thursday, November 14.
If you try Season 1 and it turns out to not be your thing, here are some other amazing FPS games and free PC games you can pivot to instead.
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